Over the past couple of days I've noticed hundreds upon hundreds of hits in my logs coming from www.skyscrapercity.com. After some analysis I determined that a user there rather rudely embedded an image on this site - a rather large picture of the Scotia Bank office tower in Toronto - in a discussion thread. Quite apart from the fact that the picture is being used unattributed (if it's good enough to use, then it's good enough to attribute), it's basically silently stealing my bandwidth quota. Very rude.

When people have done this in the past I've surprized them with delightful and entertaining image alterations, but in this case I'm just going to ignore it and let the thread die down. After looking at the source of the traffic, however, I've been reminded of the most common, and most successful, pure-.com internet play - put up a site about some sort of fly-by information (for instance skyscraper diagrams), and then add discussion links. Soon enough you'll have a robust community of users who share that interest, spending hours a day debating whether Chicago is a better looking city than Dubai. It seems like a pretty tenuous foundation for a community, but there it is.